High performance/high availability client-server computing systems require a robust and high performing Domain Name System (DNS) to facilitate communication with other computers/services that may be on the network. DNS servers may be available to provide name services. Further, one or more local and/or well-known DNS servers may be arranged to provide name services for one or more network domains. Also, in some circumstances a local/well-known DNS server may have to retrieve information from one or more remote/external DNS servers which information is in turn provided to clients of the local DNS server. Unfortunately, the domain name system used by some computers may be vulnerable to various malicious attacks that may interfere with the operations of computing systems. DNS services may be subject to denial of service attacks, man-in-the-middle attacks between the DNS servers and the clients, man-in-the-middle attacks between the local DNS server and external DNS servers, or the like, or combination thereof. Also, as computing systems scale larger and larger the performance of the DNS servers must increase as well. Further; legacy pure software based DNS systems may have difficulty meeting the ever increasing high throughput that may be required of modern DNS services. Thus, it is with respect to these considerations and others that the invention has been made.